Open models can do 90 percent of agentic work at a twentieth of the cost of a frontier LLM: Gartner

Gartner analysts Mark Petty and Raymond Paquet argue that open-weight models can handle about 90 percent of routine enterprise agentic workflow steps at parity with closed models for a quarter of the price of the cheapest closed model. They say the best-case saving against a frontier model run on every step is up to a twentieth, though current open models are more verbose and retry more often, so the realistic saving is closer to five or six times. The analysts also predict that by 2030, 90 percent of enterprise operational agent workflow steps will run on open-weight models, and they argue that harnesses, which route work between models, are where the value in AI products lies.